


a wound i do not want to replace

by poopemoji



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Body Horror, Catra (She-Ra)-centric, Character Study, Flashbacks, Gore, Guilt, Nightmares, Past Child Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:33:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24034348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poopemoji/pseuds/poopemoji
Summary: When Catra follows Adora into She-ra’s castle, or whatever the hell this place is—when she watches herself, small and pathetic and too into the idea of running with Adora to know better—she decides she’s going to drown the Rebellion, not because she loves the Horde, but because she hates She-ra.*Or: hating Adora feels the same as when Catra loved her.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 88





	a wound i do not want to replace

**Author's Note:**

> since season five is just around the corner and catra and adora won't hate each other for much longer i thought i'd remember the good old days when catra absolutely hated adora

_“The wound can have (should only have) just one proper name. I recognize that I love — you — by this: you leave in me a wound I do not want to replace.”_

— **Jacque Derrida**

*

When Catra is just a kid in the Horde, she attempts to garden. It’s a little hard, since they’re only allowed a limited time outside, and there are no real flowers with soft petals and pretty colours, and the soil kind of sucks because the river is polluted, so Adora gives her the idea to start a water garden. She digs the hole and picks the weeds that grow out of the concrete, and it’s all kind of a weird, brown colour, but it’s okay. Catra likes to funnel the water in from the murky river; mostly, she likes getting away with sneaking a cup or flask out of their barracks.

She’s got a gnarly swamp garden, and soon, she constructs a little battle arena for a nearby colony of ants too, but the trouble is they won’t stay. She consults Adora, of course, and together they locate the problem: there’s a competing ant colony east of the garden.

They consider their options. The Horde doesn’t teach them ant politics, but it should be transferable enough. Adora tries to keep them divided, smacking her forearm down as a temporary fix, but the ants are un-fearing, climbing until Catra has to squish a few. Maybe, Adora suggests, they could manipulate the territory, supply enough resources to create a healthy competition, but the truth is they don’t really know how, yet, because they’re only junior cadets. There’s no option they can carry out, no room for pluralism, and unless one colony was significantly stronger and faster than the other, lives would be lost.

So Catra opens her flask and drowns the rival colony. It’s an easy decision, because the choice depends on one thing: she knows and likes the ants from the north. She doesn’t feel anything for the eastern colony.

“No!” Adora screams and pushes Catra, knocking the flask to the ground.

“Hey, what the hell?”

“They’re just ants, Catra.”

This makes Catra laugh, high and squeaky and utterly elated as she bursts with a loud, “Exactly!” but her smile twitches, corrects itself altogether when she realizes they don’t mean the same thing. “C’mon, Adora. They’re just ants.”

“Well, yeah…” Adora nods, scratching her chin as she tries to convince herself of it. “But, how’d you know which ones to kill?”

Catra shrugs and looks at the swarm of ants that would continue their reign and fight in her arena. “I just like these ones.” And this feels good enough, because Adora’s face softens. Catra smiles at her and takes her hand as they head back inside.

*

What Catra fails to understand, as most kids do, is that not everything you like likes you back. The ants don’t keep to their routine for her. They greet the sun, the soil, and what they can get from it, not Catra. They don’t even fight the way she intended, but they hang about, and for a kid, it feels like enough.

She hates that Shadow Weaver can’t at least pretend for her, that, in fact, she can’t wait to spell it out.

 _You insolent child,_ Catra hears, again and again.

Catra’s uppers teach her what hate means. You hate the princesses. You hate what they do to us, to our land, with their dangerous powers and the tall castles they hide their weapons in. You hate them, and you will take this knife, this staff, this gun, these fists we have given you, and you will kill the thing you hate because you love the Horde.

The first time she learns what hate feels like isn’t the first time Shadow Weaver paralyzes her, but one day, Catra knocks out Adora. It’s what they’re supposed to do. They tell the junior cadets, _don’t show weakness_. They tell them that, and Catra still kneels by her side, watching Adora cup the blood to her face, unable to stand back up until Octavia seizes her wrist and plucks her from the ground like a weed. She was supposed to hit Adora, even if she didn’t want to. She was supposed to leave her there, even though she didn’t. So what was Shadow Weaver going to punish her for—hurting Adora, or caring for her?

Shadow Weaver doesn’t drag a kicking and screaming Catra into her chamber, no, she makes Catra enter, walk in by the command of her own two feet. She makes her wait right past the threshold so Catra feels the chill of air as the hydraulics close. 

Then, her shadows begin their work; sometimes they swipe her from under her feet, sometimes they coil around her lungs. Sometimes Shadow Weaver doesn’t even say anything, and it’s just Catra and all the ways her body can cry. There’s always some pressure that punches down on her skull, swells behind her vision. She thinks if her eyeballs popped out right now, Shadow Weaver would pick them up and feed them to her.

When Catra’s dismissed, Adora’s already patched up. She runs to Catra with a grin, showing off her jutted, stitched lip, a cheerful, cherry-red colour blotched with some purple. Catra smiles, trying not to cry, trying even harder not to linger as she walks past her best friend. But at night, when the doors shut and everyone’s asleep, even Shadow Weaver and her shadows, Catra hops off her bed and climbs routinely into Adora’s. She spoons Adora, blinking against the strands of hair that cling to her sopping cheeks, and Adora lets her.

They tell the junior cadets you kill what you hate to keep what you love alive, to keep it safe. Catra isn’t dead yet, and she thinks she has this bed to thank for it.

*

Catra doesn't consider herself stupid. It can be hard, when Shadow Weaver thinks that’s her god damn _name,_ but there’s always Adora, insistent and dependable and the most honest thing to walk around this rotten dump.

But then Adora leaves, and there’s nothing good and honest left at the Horde.

And then Adora doesn’t come back—she begs her, _Shadow Weaver’s gonna kill me_ —and Catra begins to wonder if there ever was.

When Catra follows Adora into She-ra’s castle, or whatever the hell this place is—when she watches herself, small and pathetic and too into the idea of running with Adora to know better—she decides she’s going to drown the Rebellion, not because she loves the Horde, but because she hates She-ra.

*

_We could be happy here._

Catra grips the sword a little tighter, like she used to do with Adora’s hand. She feels heavy under the new jacket and Scorpia’s sickeningly optimistic shadow. Could she? Would she like it? She likes that she snagged the reins pretty quick, at least. And she bagged Adora, too. It kind of felt like she was putting things into place.

It isn’t until she receives one, just one, vital piece of information that she remembers what she’s holding, where she is and why she was sent here. Whose fault it is. 

_We’ll all lose if Hordak uses his portal machine._

But more importantly, Adora will, and that’s when Catra will be happy. When Adora loses her friends, the Rebellion, Shadow Weaver, and that soft, stupid thing in her chest when she realizes victory isn’t hers, no matter how hard she fought. 

*

Catra would rather die than give Adora what she wants.

She doesn’t, and maybe that’s worse. Catra knows how to be hated like she knows her face in the mirror. She knows, God, she knows. But every step of confidence Catra took, everything about Catra and Adora depended on one thing: that Adora loved Catra. That she always would.

Now, as She-Ra glares back at her, Catra understands. There isn’t a thing Adora would ever risk drowning for Catra. Not in any lifetime a portal could give her, and certainly not in the one which they’re born.

*

In Catra’s dream, her body is not a body, but a corpse. She’s rotting, muscles and sinew weakening against the bone like a decaying tooth. Her missing eye lets a cold draft in behind her temples, and her claws have retracted so far into herself they climb up her forearm in sharp, piercing footsteps.

Across the clearing of grass, Entrapta’s hair falls off in wisps and ringlets by her boots; the locks and strands twitch and shiver and wail as they try to climb back up her legs, but they never get past her shins. The goggles over her balding head are shattered in.

“You...” Entrapta’s voice is thick and slow, like it’s about to die, and she raises her arm, points her finger at Catra. The hair by her feet blackens into shadowy tendrils, and they lunge at Catra, snaking over the ground, climbing their way up her legs.

She startles awake, choking, thrashing her feet against her bedsheet.

*

For an empire built on the ashes and ruin of literally everything around them, Catra hears an awful lot of laughter. It’s Lonnie and the two idiots. It’s always them.

It used to be all of them. Or maybe they just let her tag along with Adora.They’ve probably always hated her.

“Hey!” Catra barks, jumping off a skid meters away from them. “What’s all the noise?”

“Uh, we’re just coming back,” Kyle hiccups, cheeks puffing like an idiot before he swallows. “From, fr—”

“Please.” Catra rolls her eyes and crosses her arms. “You’re nowhere near back. You’re on the next ride out to the Eastern Quadrant.”

“What?” Lonnie steps forward. Always playing leader. “We just got back from Salineas. You were there, you saw us, we were there all damn night! And Kyle’s still seasick, he’ll be totally useless.” Without looking back, Lonnie points behind her shoulder. Kyle groans against Rogelio’s side. “We tore down Salineas, and now we control the seas. We _did_ it. The mission was a success, Catra, so just let us—”

“Ha!” sneers Catra, dropping her fists to her side. “The mission?” she stalks forward, claws shifting the soil beneath her every step. “The mission—” she lunges, slashing at the air in front of Lonnie with sharp claws. Lonnie just manages to back step, breath choked in her throat. Catra takes one easy step forward, gives Lonnie’s shoulder a shove to knock her on her ass. “Is violence. Non-stop, one after the other. The mission,” she leans in. “Is to make sure everything we do to them, everything we take, we make it hurt.”

Catra straightens, satisfied, and flashes a cruel smile scored by a sharp tooth. “Now go.”

*

The cliff she’s perched on is quiet, and so is Scorpia’s radio, it seems.

Catra never realized how many things resembled Scorpia. She can’t go outside without her eyes playing tricks. Her body is buzzing all the time, and she hates it. She hates not knowing, she hates Scorpia. She left and she hates her for it. She hates her own stupid, long hair and her ears, she hates, _hates_ Hordak and how utterly incompetent he is. She hates Lonnie and Rogelio and Kyle.

_I thought winning would be more… I dunno, fun._

*

It’s been three days and no check-in from Double Trouble. It’s the most exhausted Catra’s been, no matter how fast and fierce she pushes, and she hates it. She can’t stop now. They’ve made so much ground, they’re moving ahead so well. 

She smashes the tracker pad. It doesn’t matter. She’ll get another one, and Double Trouble will check-in, or they won’t, and it won’t matter either way because she was doing fine without them, and her plans will still move with just as much fortune. Catra’s severed every single connection she had to make sure of that.

*

In Catra’s dream, she meets the Late Queen Angella of Bright Moon. They both look the same with their tarred and serrated body parts, but the Queen’s right ear is missing, and she stares back at Catra with two pink, glowing orbs instead of eyes.

“You killed her.” she rasps. “You killed my Glimmer.”

“What—no! _No,_ I, I didn’t—”

“You killed them all.” When Queen Angella stalks forward, the dark underside of her cape casts its shadow along her body, but there’s a familiar glint of sharp, predatory talons by her feet. When Catra tries to move back, her feet are gone, her corpse suspended before the queen, her arm of malice heavy and useless at her side.

“Did you enjoy it?” the queen asks, and her eyes glow, pink that darkens to purple that gives way to garnet.

“I—” Catra cries, she tries to breathe but there’s nothing. She looks down to see her heart and lungs on the floor below her clouded shadow of a body. “No, it didn’t work, I didn’t—”

“Being a monster is not meant to be fun.” Queen Angella’s voice is calm and authoritative as her cape moves around Catra’s throat. She brings a clawed hand to Catra’s face, the good side. Finds a tuft to twirl her finger into. “It should feel like a cost.”

*

Catra will always hate She-Ra. She will blindly, unyieldingly, Horde-red rottenly hate her. And if the cost of that means she has to hate Adora—

Then Catra will learn to live with it. She’ll learn to love it.

**Author's Note:**

> i don't know. it was late and i thought this was gonna be fun


End file.
